Art Swatches

It’s spring cleaning time and everyday I’ve been setting aside a couple of hours to do a deep cleaning of some neglected corner of the house. Today I was focusing on our living/music room because I would like to clear out enough space to set up the record player. Which in turn led me to go through all the records thinking I would alphabetize them but then that made me wonder where my box of old mixtapes was (even though I don’t have a cassette player). And that led me into the back room, digging through shoeboxes full of miscellaneous things including my bag of random, irreparable Swatch watches.

When I found the bag I remembered that, in my bag of Swatches that need batteries was my Mark Kostabi “Twelve Apostles” Swatch, which is working but the band was broken. So I took a leather Swatch strap with a busted pin buckle, swapped it out with the one on the wrecked Kostabi and voilà — something at least wearable.

Swatch, of course, was doing artist collaborations way before anybody else, beginning in 1985 with the French artist, Kiki Picasso. Other famous pairings included watches designed by Keith Haring, Yoko Ono, and Mark Kostabi, who was an 1980s era art star, known for his paintings of faceless figures. He was even name dropped in the novel American Psycho. This timepiece may not be as as fancy as my Damien Hirst Mickey Mouse Swatch, but still a wearable work of art.